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Power outages hit Garapan areas
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Posted on Sep 26 2005
An “outside problem” and the breakdown of a unit in Power Plant 4 caused power to twice go off yesterday, mostly affecting the Beach Road, Garapan area, according to the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.
CUC power generation manager Al Santos said yesterday that a power trip that occurred at 8:25am, which lasted for an hour, was caused by an outside problem. He said that information reaching him indicated that a commercial banner or signage hit a primary line, causing it to trip. He said the incident happened near the Horiguchi area.
The second power interruption that began at 2:05pm and lasted for over an hour was caused by the breakdown of engine 3 at Power Plant 4.
He said he was informed by the power plant manager that the unit would be fixed on the same day.
Santos said that unit 3 had been up since last weekend but it went down again yesterday. Last week, unit 3 was brought down for the replacement of defective power packs. Unit 3 provides some 1.8MW.
On Sunday afternoon, power also briefly went off twice in Garapan and Lower Base areas due to “outside” factors.
“Power outages are a combination of inside and outside problems. For instance, a tree touching a primary line. That’s an outside problem. Our guys go out there to find the problem and fix it,” Santos said.
CUC’s rolling outages, which lasted for 41 days, ended early this month, but CUC said that some unannounced trip-offs would still occur until there is enough reserve power.
